


of the armature and the reinforcement (let us move lightly)

by Victoryindeath2



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [208]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: (he is his always his own kind of idiot though), F/M, Family Feels, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Maedhros is a tiny, Miriel Serinde's absence is the most present thing about her, Nerdanel grows many things and creates many things, fluff with some angst slipped in because these are Feanorians we are talking about, may I offer you a soft fic in these trying times, once upon a time Feanor was not a mess (mostly) (kind of)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 06:54:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23467201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Victoryindeath2/pseuds/Victoryindeath2
Summary: Feanor and Nerdanel are very much in love. For now, it is enough.
Relationships: Fëanor | Curufinwë & Maedhros | Maitimo, Fëanor | Curufinwë/Nerdanel, Maedhros | Maitimo & Nerdanel
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [208]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 3
Kudos: 25





	of the armature and the reinforcement (let us move lightly)

I.

“He has my mother’s look,” Feanor whispers to Nerdanel once, despite little Maitimo’s bright fuzz, and there is no _almost_ to his reverence.

He stands in the door of their bedchamber, half shed of the layered outer garments he wore to the barn to feed the livestock, though a deep red scarf still loops about his neck, catching at black hair wet with melting ice. Nerdanel, married not quite two years, finds herself pausing mid-stride.

Her husband’s coloring, the lines of his bones (what little can be seen—white knuckles, dagger-sharp jaw), oh, she would run to him now, or perhaps to her workroom and clays and paints, but her hands are not free. In one she carries a bed-warmer with rustling embers, and in the other, the small grandson of Miriel Serinde Feanorian.

The seven-month-old babe lies half-asleep on his mother’s shoulder and quite contentedly sucks at a tiny pawful of soft blue blanket.

Outside, an everlasting disturbance of wind flings about, wild as a wolf in pain, whirling between stripped, crooked trees. The black-rage howl shudders even the towering pines so that they lean threateningly over roof and animal den alike. The snow drifts upon the wood-bowed porch of Formenos and does its best to bury the breath of every living creature for miles, but Nerdanel nestles into her bed, her quilt, her husband. She brushes the tips of her fingers over the soft fine hair of her only son, who lies cocooned under her breast.

From birth, the babe’s hair has shown a copper sheen, like unto the hue of her own thick tresses, which lie bound in a braid, tucked between her back and Feanor’s chest.

She should have freed it before lying down, so her husband could run his hands through it, as he so dearly loves to do, but the wood floors chilled her feet even through a hardy pair of grey wool stockings, and besides—besides, all of Feanor’s attention is focused on his beloved little son, his Maedhros. Her Maitimo.

Feanor rests his chin on Nerdanel’s shoulder, and though it is a sharp thing like all the rest of him, she smiles at his warmth.

_One cannot help but feel very alive around you_.

II.

He lifts her completely off the ground, wrapping his arms around her waist from behind, pulling her away from the rich dark earth. She drops her spade to grab at his wrists, and it falls through the folds of her calico skirt.

“Feanor,” she cries, but she also laughs.

Her first flower garden in this new home is but a shape drawn with string and stakes, and she has scarcely begun to turn it over.

Dirt coats her knees underneath her skirt and lines the creases in her hands, and even her elbows have gained a layer of grime. Clay from this morning has long since hardened under her nails. She is nothing but earth, earth, earth—and she thinks _perhaps my lips also_ —but Feanor’s face is charcoaled over with his own smoke and flame.

They are very young when they kiss, mingling forge and form.

III.

A lamb stew simmers above the hearth, and extra buttery shortbread, recently removed from the stove, cools in its tin dish upon a white windowsill.

“You must get more rest,” Feanor nigh commands.

He towers over Nerdanel, who sits on a bench at the rough-hewn kitchen table, tying sprigs of rosemary together. The plant has grown in abundance this spring, and so Nerdanel has taken to hanging its leaves from little hooks that run along the beams above her.

“ _I_ am not the one with shadows beneath my eyes,” Nerdanel retorts. She snips another piece of twine. She doesn’t look up, she won’t, because she is cross that Feanor has not divested himself of his large sooty apron, when she has chided him time and again—

She drops a bit of rosemary, and it falls to the floor. She reaches, bending over carefully, but another hand darts in, quick as a robin’s beak.

They collide, draw back.

She risks a glance then, from the corner of her eye. Feanor, unlike himself, turns away to the nearest window, which hangs open a few inches, to allow for a spring draft of birdsong and early crabapple blossom.

Nerdanel can see, even from where she sits, the way his angular bones are set to fracture—his shoulder blades are tense, visible even through his thin pale shirt, and when he half knuckles his hands into fists, she must stop herself from reaching.

This is nothing like her husband’s typical spurting vexation, but it is not simple anger either.

Nerdanel wants to see his face, and she does not. She has stumbled upon Feanor in uncertainty very few times before, but when she has, the fear crackling across his face makes him too young for her to know him. Still not young enough for him to have known—

And there it is, the source of the trouble.Nerdanel’s hands fall to her lap. There is movement within her, as if her little one can sense how she has turned wrongly.

He is often still and quiet, snuggled round himself in the safest of places, but he always awakens to her rising emotions, whether they be of joy or sorrow.

There—a tiny hand, perhaps, or a foot, gently pressing against the walls of her womb.

She does not speak the words that perversely threaten to climb up her throat—the observation that her difficulties with sleep arise neither from the swell of her belly nor from the soreness of muscles and bones that must perforce move differently. Not that these things never trouble her, but Feanor is the only one who brings her grief.

“Forgive me, my love. Perhaps I _am_ over-tired.”

Her young husband does not answer. He is proud, this one, this boy-man who can sweep her along with him into any dream he fashions. Two artists, love and marriage and a house all their own, built from his own design (oh the secret nooks and hiding places! _Necessary_ , he claimed, and she did not even throw up her hands, so earnest his demeanor).

Feanor turns—his lips are flushed as though they have been pressed a full minute between his teeth—and he leaves.

_One cannot help but feel very alive around you, and yet your mother..._

IV.

Somewhere, down a little hallway from the kitchen, there is a door that leads into a room with so many windows that Feanor has declared it a sunporch, though it receives natural light but half the morning. In this room, Nerdanel works with her wheel and her clays, which she keeps wrapped in damp cloth in various barrels or cupboards or any other cool, dark nook she can find. In this room also are great rocks of marble, more dearly beloved to her than any other medium. Some she has begun to pitch away, patiently outlining her creative visions, while others are smooth and as yet untouched, waiting. The whole back wall of the studio is lined with shelves full of her creations, sculptures and pottery alike.

And then there are the tools. Everything has its place, though only Nerdanel could say where that was. Chisels and rasps and all sorts of like things scatter themselves about her worktables in white dusted array.

Occasionally, Nerdanel will attempt a tidying up. There is, after all, a mahogany trunk with intricate Celtic etchings that Feanor spent too much money on, for her cutters and trimming tools, her tongs and her calipers. Another box again, less ornamented, for all her precious paint.

( _You should not have_ , Nerdanel said, when he presented the former with ribbons and his own self-satisfied flourishes of speech and brow.

_You should not have_ , but she cannot be cross with him now, not when she is about to reveal a greater treasure.

_Will he cry out and immediately begin the ordering of a grand parade_ , she wonders, _or, kneeling, press his lips to my womb?)_

Nerdanel is no great beauty, nothing like the queens and goddesses that ride through and rule the old Irish myths Feanor loves so well—but still, but still. But still he loves _her_.

Her husband with his moods and his ever-flaming heart—he has his stories, his dreams, his fears. An altar that is as much imagination as memory. Nerdanel never asks whether he loves her more.

Some questions go unthought of for years, and it is better that way.

_Is it?_

V.

“Forgive me.”

These words, after he is gone, in apology for what she did not speak.

( _You wake me at night. Of what do you dream?_

_My mother_ , her narrow boy-husband might answer. How sharp his shoulders would be as he endeavored to snap them straight across, to keep them from shuddering with his breath. _My mother and death—and you_.)

(Feanor has cried before while she pretended to breathe evenly into her pillow, pretended to be untroubled by his fears and her own dreams that lattice the future like wandering vines.

In the end, she slips her hand into his, determined the entwinement will last a lifetime long, a long lifetime.)

VI.

In the end, there is a scraping in the hallway, wood upon wood, and then a ceasing. Feanor, less his forge-apron, grunts and heaves a massive, plain-carved rocking chair into the kitchen. Its normal place is in another room, beside another hearth and an empty and waiting cradle, yet he brings it here, sets it gently by the table and rosemary, and Nerdanel hides a smile and the way she is ready to forgive her husband all his faults.

Feanor smooths the rocker’s blue-flowered cushion, assures himself it is tied in place, and then—he settles in the chair himself.

Nerdanel has no words. She straightens on her bench, holds a bundle of twine and her scissors aloft in her hands in a gesture of disbelief.

Feanor looks at her, blind to his guilt, one might think, save for the way he quirks his brow in squirrelish mischief. The corner of his lip quivers sharp with mirth.

“What are you doing?” Nerdanel snaps.

Or rather, she wants to snap, wants to throw rosemary in his smooth, mocking face (and so she stands) but instead—

She steps too close.

Feanor grabs her wrist in his iron fingers (he does not bruise her, yet) and pulls her softly down, arranging her unusual weight upon the throne of his lap, draping one of her arms around his stupid, stubborn neck, and then—

He kisses the fingers of her right hand, all while gazing at her with scrunched up, laughing eyes.

He smells of burnt pine wood and perversely delicious sweat.

These are small things, they must be ignored, until she can make him acknowledge his imperfections and his idiocy.

(Nerdanel bends too easily.)

“Whatever shall I do with you?”

Her husband, young and as yet unafraid, reaches for the opening of his shirt. It is unfastened by a few buttons already, and he pulls it aside, revealing his collarbone and its various hollows. He tilts his shoulders so that the former is more pronounced.

“You have kissed me only twice today,” he says. “Perhaps you could bestow one more?”

At times (all the time) Feanor believes the current of the entire world should flow only the way of the riverbeds he digs.

Perhaps, Nerdanel will deny him.

Perhaps.

VII.

Many hours into the first day of her first-born’s life, long-past the pain of an extended labor (though not the exhaustion, or lingering aches) Nerdanel finally manages to sleep. She wakes a while later to the sound of off-key singing from somewhere in the house, the kitchen most likely, where the girl from the farm a mile away will be clanging Nerdanel’s clean black pots around, endeavoring to put together a dinner.

If Nerdanel has her way, her kitchen will be her own again before the end of tomorrow evening, or maybe even the afternoon. She is strong enough for that (she will be), and it would reassure Feanor, for her to be walking so soon.

The delivery had been—strenuous. The fear leading up to it, unspeakable. (For so many reasons. Her husband was not the only one who grew up without a mother.)

Nerdanel still feels the sweat on her brow, though it has been wiped clean. Even now, it is difficult to breathe steady.

Feanor. Where is he? The room rests in curtain-hushed light, no sign of the struggle in the golden morning. All that is left are the flowers, roses, in a large glass vase by her bed. Roses pink and red and white.

(Feanor _would_ bring them in from his hothouse, as though the velvet blossoms might ease her travails!

She had sworn at him once, when he winked and proclaimed he was growing children all on his own.)

Nerdanel turns her head a little more, moving her cheek so it rests softly on her pillow and brushed out hair.

There he is, close by the window, murmuring and swaying back and forth, clutching the bundle in his arms as though he will never be parted from it.

Nerdanel smiles and wonders what sort of grand introduction her husband has been giving little Maedhros to the blinding bright existence that stretches before him.

Feanor, however, falls silent. He breathes rapidly, and tilts Maedhros just a little, and in the space between innocence and instinct, he kisses the babe’s soft copper hair.

All is well.

All is well, and so, once more, Nerdanel drifts away.


End file.
